Looking forward

I've loved having a shed full of vegetables this autumn. That has pleased me even more than all the fresh stuff that was available all summer. So to cheer myself up I've sat down with the seed catalogues and ordered the following:

Potatoes: Sarpo Mira as my main crop again, to resist blight, plus smaller amounts of a couple of other fun looking early varieties to try out.
Onions: Red and brown. My autumn planted onions are doing very well but I've heard they don't keep as long as proper spring planted sets.
Garlic: My autumn-planted garlic is looking very sorry for itself, the soil is so heavy I think some cloves have rotted off in the ground, so I've ordered some more for spring planting ,just in case. I saw a good technique on Gardener's World for planting them: Mix in plenty of sand to the soil for drainage, then plant the cloves on ridges in the soil, so they don't sit in water. Shame I didn't think of that sooner.

Now just got to sit back and wait for it all to arrive!

Christmas Harvest

I've now been to the plot and harvested most of my Christmas dinner, something I've been looking forward to for ages!

First on the list was a big bag of parsnips. There were plenty of these in good condition, good news as I love parsnips! The cold should have sweetened them up nicely. If they didn't take so long to germinate, parsnips would be the perfect vegetable, as no pests eat them, not even the tops, and they can withstand frost and snow. They were absolutely covered in thick mud, though, as the plot was very damp. I will grow more of these next year.

Second, carrots, out of their sand storage boxes. Thankfully they were still in there, and had not been stolen by the person who forced the lock off my shed. Not quite as good as I'd hoped, but still OK. The ones I stored in compost from a grow-bag are in better condition than the ones in sand. That is good news as I can re-use the grow-bag compost for improving my soil. I now know you can leave carrots in the ground until quite late, too, so I'll try that next time.

Third stop at the plot was plenty of fresh rosemary for the lamb. All the herbs in the supermarket had sold out this week (although they had no shortage of sprouts), so I may put some herbs in pots next year and try to keep them through winter.

Finally, I've still got plenty of spuds in the shed for Christmas dinner, plus garlic and onions if I need them. The Sarpo Mira potatoes I grew avoided all blight and keep really well, but they don't make the best roast potatoes which is a shame. I reckon they'd be nicer if I used goose fat or beef dripping to roast them, but we've got a vegetarian coming for Christmas! Curses!

Unfortunately I've had to buy leeks, as my diminutive specimens have now started to receive the attention of the plot rabbits.. but there's always next year. I can't wait.

Britain in Bloom

Here are the promised pictures of my garden, winner of Best Small Garden in Wolverton 2008. Having seen these again, I'm glad I uploaded them in the depths of winter. It's warming to have a reminder of what things are like at the opposite end of the year. Enjoy.

The Joy of Soup

One of the things about having lots of vegetables laying about is trying to think of what to do with them so they're not wasted. For example, I've lost count of the number of different ways I've served courgettes - our poor friends and family have had them in any number of guises all summer. Mind you, the Chinese fried courgette sticks never stay on the plate long.

So, my new favourite thing to do with a big stack of vegetables is make soup. I've never done it before, and even if I say so myself, my first efforts have been a resounding success. I should explain, my earliest experience of making soup. It was late 1995, and involved a packet of powdered mushroom and garlic soup from my best man's kitchen cupboard. We decided it would be a great idea to make it at around 3am, but we both fell asleep waiting for it and boiled the pan dry, much to the chagrin of his ever-patient wife who was trying to sleep through the noise and disgusting smell of our drunken antics. Therefore, I thought making 'real' soup would be really hard, and involve large black pots bubbling away for several days, maybe carefully adding eye of newt and toe of frog every four hours, only for the whole thing to get spoiled if someone rings the doorbell and distracts me. But no, they're dead easy.

So far I have made leek and potato (which nicely hides the diminutive stature of my leeks) and carrot and coriander. Both delicious, filling, and 100% nicer than anything I've ever had out of a tin or packet.

Autumn photo gallery

In my continued effort to keep up to date, here are a few photos from the last few months down on the plot.










First, my sunflowers eventually started producing blooms, and we had a fair few vases full of these in the house for a while. I happened to notice them on sale in the florists for an extortionate amount! Mine cost the price of a pack of seeds, about £2, and now, of course, I have an airing cupboard full of free seeds for next year! The hyperbole on the seed packet led me to believe I would need sunglasses to look at these, and people would be coming from far and wide to view my many-coloured blooms. Far from becoming something of a local celebrity, I was a bit disappointed that the ‘harlequin’ seeds produced mostly bog-standard yellow flowers.










I was quite excited at the beginning of autumn, planning what to plant for next year, but the excitement has worn off in the face of regular rain showers and the return to GMT which have both been keeping me off the plot.

Here, however, are pictures of my first winter veg. Parsnips have been slowly growing away all year, thanks to early identification by John they didn’t get pulled up. They’re nice and sweet.

Pak Choi are now coming along well. These are to be used in the spring, or whenever they are big enough. I seem to have solved the flea beetle problem by applying simple cardboard collars (as seen on Gardener’s World) and covering them with a mini polytunnel, excellent value from B&Q only £9.99. Also in the polytunnel are spring onions and overwintering lettuce. I’ll see how the spring onions get on, but I may not bother with many more of those – they’re easy to grow but never seem to be ready when I want them, and don’t seem to store well – when they’re so ridiculously cheap in the shops all year round I might devote the space to something else.









Not pictured here are my leeks. I couldn’t get a picture because they’re too small for the human eye to detect. The biggest ones are only like the baby leeks you get from the supermarket. I suspect a combination of poor soil and late planting out.

Everyone else at Stacey Hill seems to have grown leeks as big as American fire hydrants, with their luxuriant, rust-free foliage waving and mocking me as I pass. Mine are more like pencils. And not even those big novelty pencils you get at the seaside. Mind you, they still taste good.

Late summer on Plot 29

The Moog and I have been a bit busy to update the blog recently, or possibly a bit lazy, take your pick. I'm going to have a go at bringing things up-to-date over the next few days. Let's start with the end of August.

It occured to me in August that it's a full year since I've had my plot. You may have read that I invested my £7 winnings from second place in the 2007 "Britain in Bloom" competition; this year, ta-da, I have won first prize! a whopping twenty Great British Pounds, and a certificate to boot. I will post some pictures of my front garden for curious blog readers when I get round to it. This year, I invested my winnings in a delicious curry from Cafe Balti in Wolverton.


Also in late summer (Hmph! What summer?! I hear you cry) harvesting was in full flow. I was a bit worried about carrots splitting, so I pulled most of them up in late August and put them in storage. There were loads, as you can see from the picture. Some of them were forked, some of them were split, but overall they've been pretty good. No carrot fly attacks. To store them, I bought a grow-bag for about £1.25 from the nearest DIY shed, and filled two cardboard boxes with layers of carrots and compost. So far (November) they're as fresh and crunchy as they were when they went in. Mind you, the bottom did fall out of one of the boxes last week, covering my shed floor in carrots and compost, you can imagine how pleased I was.


Onions were also dug up, dried in the garden at home (between rain showers), and strung up in the shed. We've been gradually working our way through them, and they're storing really well.

From the greenhouse at home, we collected a big bowl of green tomatoes and ripened them on the window sill. I have to say I couldn't tell the difference between ours and shop-bought ones (that is, ours were not the delicious globes of sweet flavour that I'd been led to expect). And if one more person mentions green tomato chutney, I may have to set an angry Moog on them.

The final crop I started harvesting in late summer was potatoes. The Sarpo Mira variety have been really successful, lots of nice big potatoes, no blight, and they seem to store really well. They eventually all came out of the ground in mid-September, although I think they might have been happy to stay in the ground a bit longer, they were starting to receive attention from slugs, so they came up.

Failure Count

I have had lots of congratulations from various people on my successes this year, so Moog thought I should let reality have a look in and share some of my failures:

1. Cut and Come Again salad leaves. These all bolted to seed. In fairness, not really a failure, because the reason they bolted was that I chose not to pick them - they didn't taste very nice!

2. Wild Rocket. All germinated, and then all completely wiped out by flea beetle. Almost overnight there was nothing left, not even a stalk.

3. Radishes and Pak Choi have been riddled with holes by flea beetle. This is probably due to me eradicating their favoured food source, which is Oilseed Rape. I can't win.

4. Tomatoes. I don't know why I bother. One minute they're fine, the next minute, the stems and fruits are brown with blight. John pointed it out to me this week and I was forced to burn all my allotment tomatoes. Greenhouse crop is still going steady at home. For now.

5. Leek rust. This covered my garlic, but luckily didn't spoil the crop. It has now graduated on to my leeks. Hopefully the white parts under the soil will be saved from destruction (apparently you can still eat rusty leeks if it doesn't get too bad) but after seeing how fast it spread I have decided to resort to a chemical spray of dithane (fungicide) on this crop to try and save them.

6. Split carrots. I avoided carrot fly, but quite a few carrots got too big and split, so I've had to harvest them all to stop them growing any bigger. Hopefully I'll be able to store them for long enough, only time will tell.

I blame all these problems squarly on the weather - a bit more sunshine and warmth in August wouldn't go amiss! The only time we did get any sun, I went to the plot in shorts and got attacked by my next pest:

7. Red ants. These aggressive little blighters managed to get into my boot and bit me 4-5 times, making my whole foot swell up to about twice normal size! And it itched like mad!

So there you go; it's not all rosy down at the plot, even if I make it look that way sometimes.